48 hours to create the next 'Angry Birds'

Bring on the 3-D computer animation modelers from Ringling College of Art & Design, the pizza-flavored Combos pretzels and the Monster energy drinks.

For the first time, Sarasota will participate directly this weekend in a 48-hour, video-game-developing marathon called Global Game Jam.

The hackathon-for-gamers event is slated to start Friday night at the HuB, a collaborative workspace on Fruitville Road in downtown Sarasota, and run straight through until 7 p.m. Sunday.

The HuB will be one of 450 places around the world where game developers gather — physically and virtually — to throw together actual working video games faster than a Hummer gets lifted in Grand Theft Auto. The HuB will be the only host on the west coast of Florida, organizers say.

More than two dozen potential video game developers have already signed up to be part of the local event.

When all is said and done, and the Red Bull has likely run out, some 3,000 games are expected to be produced worldwide from more than 60 countries.

Ringling College video producer Joe Granato IV persuaded Rich Swier Jr., the proprietor of the HuB, to let the games unfold in the HuB's third floor common area.

Granato, 33, is a self-taught specialist in Unity 3-D, a cross-platform game engine used to bring together game components. This will be his fifth Game Jam.

When the gamers gather on Friday, they will split into four or five teams, with the goal of developing a game idea — and specifics — that could be a prototype for a new commercial video game.

Because many participants hail from Ringling College, Swier and Granato expect the weekend's results to be very art intensive.

Clayton Bronson Chod, president of the college's game design club, is among those who have signed up. At the school's computer animation department, Chod, a game design major, specializes in 3-D modeling and texturing.

Among his designs is an “Exhibition Arena,” a 3-D boxing ring for robots in which characters can move around. The arena is part of his senior thesis, entitled “Rivet Busters.”

“I figured this was a good opportunity to get my feet wet in the whole game jam scene,” said Chod, a senior at Ringling who plans to interview for jobs at various video game studios.

Such hackathons are held — and participants like Chod willingly give up a weekend's sleep — because there's potentially big money in gaming.

Last fall, for instance, Rockstar Games' highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V generated more than $1 billion in revenue within the first three days of its release.

“We have about twenty people going down with Joe to the HuB,” said Martin Murphy, a Ringling instructor who teaches students majoring in game art and design.

This is the fifth year for the Global Game Jam, a project of the International Game Developers' Association from 2009 through 2012. The first jam, held Jan. 30 to Feb. 1, 2009, drew 1,600 participants in 23 countries.

Beginning in 2013, the weekend was taken over by Global Game Jam Inc.

Participants agree to share how they designed their games in a open software forum, but they, as teams, retain the intellectual rights to the games they create, according to the group's website, GlobalGameJam.org.

Participants start by watching a short video with advice from leading game developers on Friday night. After that, a secret theme is announced and participants break up into teams.

Participants are challenged to make games based on that theme before the event wraps Sunday afternoon.

“You're not going to get an Xbox 360 out of it, but you could get Angry Birds,” Granato said. “You could get a lot of the games you eventually see on a mobile device.”